spinning beachball

S

Stormy_

Registered
Hello

My dad has just recently erased his drive on his 17" apple desktop and has reinstalled the os (10.2) that came with his mac. He then added jaguar. The problem he is having is a very slow start up and when he clicks on preferences from the apple he gets the spinning beachball of death. He said occasionaly it will eventually come out of it and let him do something else. He has also purchased panther to be here next week. What can he do in the meantime? What does it sound like he needs to do? Can he just install Panther when it arrives without his other os?

Thank you in advance your help will greatly be appreciated. :)
 
Your best bet would be back up any data (documents, pictures, music, videos) and do a fresh install but zero the disk (format it) before installing the new operating system.
 
You will get better performance from OS X 10.3 or 10.4, too. 10.2 is being weaned off of support.
 
Updating Jaguar - 10.2.0 to 10.2.8 should have a notable improvement in overall performance.

Panther - 10.3.0 is dangerous to keep. It was widely published to have external hard disk drive problems - such as erasing them. Once installed - immediately - update. Thus, download, and store on a USB RAM disk / USB Drive /thumb drive, any Combo Update of 10.3.1 through 10.3.9 before installing 10.3.0. Updating to 10.3.4 at a minimum should produce desirable results. Updating beyond 10.3.4 may be required, due to some applications - such as 'iLife', etc.

To some, Tiger - 10.4.0 results in a little degradation of overall performance. Some blame 'Widgets' as the cause; however, viewing 'Activity Monitor' [Panthers' and Tigers' version of Jaguars' 'Process Viewer'] shows that nearly all, if not all, properly designed / behaving 'Widgets' become inactive when 'Dashboard' is switched out.

Sadly, updating to 10.4.7 or 10.4.8 will result in ones' Macintosh calling home to Apple approximately every eight (8) hours, untill 'com.apple.dashboard.advisory.fetch.plist' is either disabled or removed.
 
10.3 Panther is a very nice OS and I concur that you'll see a performance increase and fewer "spinning beachballs of death". But, as barbar mentioned above, immediately update to 10.3.9 (free update) by using Software Update (Apple menu).

Also check to see how much RAM memory the machine has and how much hard drive space is available. If the machine has only 256 megabytes of RAM, consider upgrading to at least 512 MB.

If the hard drive has less than 3 gigabytes available, delete any files you no longer need. Be careful when deciding to delete files you don't recognize.

Finally, go to System Preferences. Look in (I think) the Login Items preferences or account preferences and look at the programs that are running on startup. Perhaps one is misbehaving and slowing everything down.

Let us know if he still has problems after trying these suggestions.

Doug
 
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